Party Politics - The late cold war and beyond

The Vietnam War may be somewhat unusual in the degree to which it linked
domestic political considerations and foreign policy, but it is by no
means exceptional in the nation's recent history. Jimmy
Carter's decision to launch a risky and ultimately disastrous
mission to free American hostages in Iran in the spring of 1980, for
example, owed something to his domestic political difficulties in an
election year, including a tough challenge for the Democratic nomination
from Senator Edward Kennedy. Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton
Jordan, urged the action "to prove to the columnists and our
political opponents that Carter was not an ineffective Chief Executive who
was afraid to act." Carter himself explained that he had "to
give expression to the anger of the American people. If they perceive me
as firm and tough in voicing their rage, maybe we'll be able to
control this thing."

A decade later another president confronted the perception that he was too
timid. During the 1988 campaign George Bush had to endure a
Newsweek
story on him in which the words "Fighting the Wimp Factor"
were emblazoned on the cover, and there were charges from conservative
quarters in the months after the inauguration that he was not resolute
enough in foreign policy. The "wimp" charges could be heard
again in October 1989, when Bush failed to back a nearly successful coup
d'état against the drug-running Panamanian strongman Manuel
Noriega. "We'll be hit from the left for being involved at
all," the president noted privately, "and we'll be
hit harder from the right for being timid and weak." This
right-wing reaction to his inaction—Republican Senator Jesse Helms
referred to a "bunch of Keystone Kops" in the
administration—almost certainly contributed to Bush's
decision in December to order the invasion of Panama to arrest Noriega. In
August 1990 various motives moved Bush to adopt an uncompromising position
toward Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, but one of them was
surely the domestic political benefits that he and his advisers believed
could accrue from it. Locked in a budget battle with Congress, faced with
a messy savings and loan scandal, and with approval ratings sagging, Bush
saw a chance to demonstrate forceful presidential leadership and galvanize
popular support. Tellingly, perhaps, he received encouragement to
"draw a line in the sand" from British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher—who herself had received a powerful boost to her
domestic position from Britain's "splendid little
war" in the Falkland Islands eight years earlier.

The war against Iraq was the first military conflict of the
post–Cold War era. In the years thereafter various commentators
complained that America's newfound status as the world's
sole superpower, one without a compelling external threat to unify the
populace, had allowed party politics to infuse foreign policymaking to an
unprecedented degree. Many drew a contrast with the supposedly bipartisan
and selfless days of the Cold War. It was a dubious claim; party politics
and foreign policy have always enjoyed a close relationship in the United
States. This was so in the most tense periods of the superpower
confrontation—during the Cuban missile crisis, John Kennedy
considered the domestic political implications of the various options
before him—and it was true in less traumatic times.

Still, few would deny that the partisanship became more pronounced in the
Clinton years than it had been in decades, the atmosphere in Washington
more poisonous. The power of the presidency in foreign policy seemed
diminished and that of Congress as well as ethnic and other
special-interest lobbies enhanced. Republicans saw personal political
advantage as motivating virtually every one of Bill Clinton's
foreign policy decisions and, after capturing control of Congress in the
1994 midterm elections, worked diligently to thwart many of his
initiatives. In April 1999, for example, during the war in Kosovo, the
House of Representatives refused to vote to support the bombing; that
October, the Senate voted down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—an
action the
New York Times
compared with the Senate defeat of the League of Nations after World War
I—even though the president and sixty-two senators asked that it be
withdrawn. Clinton and his advisers, meanwhile, insisted that their only
concern in making policy was promoting the national interest. The early
evidence about the policymaking process in the Clinton White House
suggests strongly that he and his aides paid close attention to how
various policy options would be perceived at home and that their
determinations in this regard helped inform their decisions. In other
words, Clinton was much like his predecessors.

During the debate over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's
eastward enlargement in 1996–1997, Clinton administration officials
insisted that bringing as much of Europe as possible under the NATO banner
would serve the nation's strategic interests. They also said it was
important to reassure the eastern and central European populations after
Moscow became more nationalistic and assertive in 1994. No doubt they were
being truthful in these claims, but Democratic Party leaders surely also
saw enlargement as a surefire vote-getter among eastern European ethnic
communities in battleground states in the Midwest, states Clinton had to
win in the 1996 election. Foreign observers often perceived this domestic
political element to be the root motivation behind the expansion. Said
Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien (who thought his microphone
was turned off) to Belgium's prime minister about NATO enlargement
in August 1997: "All this for short-term political reasons, to win
elections. In fact [U.S. politicians] are selling their votes, they are
selling their votes…. It's incredible. In your country or
mine, all the politicians would be in prison."